The Leaving (26 page)

“Nothing.”

Everyone looked to Scarlett, who also shook her head.

“I don’t know what to say, guys,” Chambers said. “I was really hoping for some kind of epiphany for you all. I was hoping you’d get here and it would all flood back for you.”

“It’s just. It doesn’t make sense.” Lucas stood.

Chambers said, “It makes more sense than anything has in eleven years.” He turned to face them all. “This was the guy. This was the place. You were here.”

“Why only five?” Lucas asked. “Why wasn’t Max in any of the photos?”

“Maybe he was never here,” Chambers said. “Maybe his going missing was totally unrelated.”

Lucas didn’t like that idea.

Didn’t like what it meant for Avery and her family.

That they’d wasted eleven years on the wrong search, the wrong type of grieving and hope.

He didn’t want it to be true.

Didn’t want any of this to be happening.

He wanted to see the photos.

Maybe that was the whole point of it, the tattoo.

“There’s something you’re going to want to see.” Chambers ducked back out of the room. “Maybe it will convince you.”

AVERY

The tip line headquarters was in the capital building of Blandville.

Well, not really.

But yes, it was the kind of building you’d never notice if you hadn’t had reason to go there. In the kind of stretch of useless buildings that, if you were lucky, you’d never have any occasion to visit in your whole life.

Blandville Dry Cleaners.

Blandville Pizza.

Blandville Tax Accountant.

Blandville Florist.

Blandville Wines and Liquors.

The Blandville Tip Line’s storefront might have been a bank once, or insurance office, or campaign headquarters for the Blandville mayor. It looked temporary, malleable. Just tables and phones and laptops and a coffeemaker and a tall water cooler with a stout blue family of empty jugs beside it.

Avery had been introduced around and her mother had put on quite an impressive performance in her leading role as GRATEFUL MOTHER OF MISSING CHILD.

A round of applause.

Brava.

Standing O.

Avery hadn’t known that her mother had it in her, to pull out such a masterful performance. Maybe that was where she’d gotten her interest in theater and drama at school.

Last night, her mom had dropped to her knees and said, “Oh, thank god,” when the call had come that the body was not Max’s.

Avery had had quite a different reaction.

She’d been, well, disappointed.

Still was.

Because it meant that the waiting and wondering was going to drag on.

Did she want Max to be dead?

Of course not.

Did she want this whole thing to be over with?

Absolutely.

It meant she had to redouble her efforts.

She had to find another way to get answers.

She’d been ignoring texts from Emma all morning:

Any news?

You okay?

What’s going on?

Maybe you lost your phone?

It had started to feel like a game:

IGNORING EMMA’S TEXTS.

FOR 1 PLAYER. AGES 14 AND UP.

Like, did Emma’s brain have the capacity to think of maybe trying to call the landline or do anything other than keep texting?

The last text had been the one that really irked her.

Poor Sam.

Poor
Sam
?

That
was her takeaway?

This morning there had been a text from Lucas, too.

How are you holding up?

Did that mean he understood how she felt?

Because he hadn’t said “Relieved for you” or “Happy for you.”

Or was she reading into it?

She knew the cops were taking them all there.

So she’d texted:

Good luck today.

He’d written back:

Thanks.

They were here now with coffee and donuts, to say thanks, as well—to the tip line staff.

Yes, thanks, tip line.

Thanks for nothing.

Avery was eating a too-sweet jelly donut when she was cornered by a nerdy-looking woman in her forties with a long black ponytail.

“I remember you,” the woman said. “I remember it all. And you, so little. On the news.”

“Yeah?” Avery said. “I guess everyone who was around then remembers.”

“Who could forget,” the woman said—seemingly without any awareness at all of how ridiculous a statement that was. “I felt so awful for all you families. I joined a search party and everything.”

“Well, um”—this was too weird—“Thanks, I guess.”

The woman smiled sadly.

“So who was the tip from?” Avery asked, sounding upbeat. “Who made the call? Are they collecting the reward?”

“Oh.” The woman waved a hand. “It was anonymous. When there’s a dead body involved, they usually are.”

Avery cocked her head. “You do this a lot? This kind of work?”

“Nine-one-one operator.”

“Ah.” Avery nodded. “Well, I’m glad it turned up a good lead. I’m glad they caught the guy. My father thought it was just all going to be crazy people.”

“Well, we have those, too. They’re
still
calling.” She looked at her watch. “Speaking of which, I should get back to the phones.”

“What are they saying, the crazy people?”

“Oh, you know. The crazy things.” She smiled and walked off.

S
c
a
r
l
et
t

The color matching of memory and reality was striking.

The stripes, if measured, would have been equal down to the millimeter.

You couldn’t see Scarlett.

Or anyone.

The photo had been taken from the ground, looking up at the balloon.

But she knew she was there in that dangling basket.

F l o a t  i   n    g.

“This is it.” She stepped closer to the large framed photograph on the wall of a big lodge-like room.

A singular cloud in the distance had the shape of an elephant mid-sneeze.

Felt calm just standing there.

Hypnotized.

“This is the puppy.” Sarah broke the spell.

Scarlett turned to the voice, saw the puppy photo.

Beside that, a horse in a meadow.

Then . . . the crisscross hill of a roller coaster going up, up, up to the sky.

And a carousel horse in close-up.

Five large framed photos.

“This is the horse,” Kristen said.

“This is the roller coaster,” Adam said.

Lucas stood in front of the carousel horse, transfixed. “So we’re remembering photographs?” he asked.

   /
     /

“Not necessarily,” Chambers said. “These could be photos from things that you actually did. Just without you in them.”

“These prints are big,” Adam’s father said. “They had to have been printed specially.”

Chambers nodded. “I’ll send people out to print shops. See if anything pops.”

“Wouldn’t they just do that online or something?” Kristen asked.

“It’s not exactly the kind of place where you’d get deliveries.”

Scarlett turned back to her photo.

Her photo?

But something felt . . .

She took in the details of the room.

Lantern lights hanging from wooden beams.

A round window high on one wall, like a porthole.

Nothing but the photo familiar.

“I don’t understand,” Scarlett said. “This isn’t anywhere near Anchor Beach.”

“I know.” Chambers nodded. “But the evidence is overwhelming.”

“Did anybody near here ever see us?” she said. “Remembers us?”

“The nearest town is Everglades City and it’s not much of a town. We’re asking around.” Chambers scratched his head. “This
happens
, this kind of stuff, and it’s a shock
every time
. Women held in basements for years—babies being born while neighbors were only just fifty feet away—and no one around knew or even suspected anything was wrong.”

Scarlett went back to staring at her hot air balloon.

Now that she was here, the memory felt . . . fake.

Chambers was still talking. “We found vials. Syringes. They’re being tested. Some were labeled as a protein Sashor has talked about. A protein involved in memory formation.”

“But who
is
he?” Scarlett asked. “Why did he do this?”

“Don’t know,” Chambers said. “Possibly just to make it easier to keep you here longer?”

“But
why
? And how would he have the skills to do it all?”

“We don’t know yet.”

Scarlett asked, “But who killed him?”

“We don’t know,” Chambers said.

She shouted, “You don’t know anything!”

/
  /
       /

She was in the abyss.

Alone.

No, wait . . .

Tammy was there, too, chewing gum; she seemed to approve of her daughter’s outburst. Something about the hand on her hip showed a bit of defiant swagger.

Kristen said, “Under hypnosis, I remembered something. A journal I hid near an owl. Did you find any . . . owls?”

Chambers shook his head. “No owls, no.”

Like he was talking to a crazy person, pandering.

They all stood there for a moment, disappointment spreading like toxic invisible gas. Scarlett felt the urge to cough, resisted.

Then Chambers said, “Come on, I’ve got one more thing to show you back at the dock.”

They walked back across one of the bridges. Police officers in chest-high rubber overalls were out scouring the property.

Scarlett fell in step beside Chambers and asked, “Did you find a gun?”

Lucas caught up with them and said, “What about a camera?”

Lucas

The ride back seemed faster.

The cloud burning off, the sky becoming blue again.

This time, he had his camera in hand the whole way.

Pink birds.

Click
.

White birds.

Click
.

Tall grass.

Click
.

An alligator—or was that a stone?

The evidence said he’d been here.

He had no way to prove otherwise.

Back at the airboat dock, they followed Chambers through a field to an old garage.

Scarlett came over to Lucas’s side as they walked. “There are no stairs,” she said. “And like I said, it’s nowhere near Anchor Beach.”

He nodded. “It feels, I don’t know . . . staged?”

“We have no way to prove it,” she said.

“Not yet.” He caught up with Sarah. “The house you see in your mind’s eye. Is it here? Is this it?”

She shook her head. “Maybe it’s just a house I drew. And a girl I drew. Imaginary.”

“Maybe.” Lucas had yet to come up with a good theory about the mystery girl Sarah remembered.

“Have you drawn them?” Scarlett asked. “So we can see?’

“I’m working on it,” she said. “Soon.”

Some uniformed officers were standing in front of a large shed and stepped aside as the group approached. They fanned out in a semicircle at the open door.

The mud was so thick that it was hard, at first, to even see it.

The yellow-orange paint of a small school bus.

“There’s a white van, too,” Chambers said. “Like the one you described. Broken taillight and all.”

Lucas stepped into the shade of the structure to get the sun out of his eyes, to better see. He lifted his camera, took a few shots. Let it drop to hang around his neck on its strap.

Chambers looked at his phone, read a message, looked back up. “We have a gun,” he said. “Listen, I’ll be in touch with you all after we go over every inch of this place. And I’ll come see each of you with some of the items we found.”

He ushered them back to the parking lot, and Lucas couldn’t take his eyes off Chambers’s weapon, holstered in his belt.

Thought about grabbing it.

Aiming it.

Firing it.

When Chambers started to walk off toward his car, Lucas called out, “Wait!”

Chambers stopped and turned.

Everyone else turned, too.

And Lucas felt that dizziness return, for the first time in days—

HORSES, TEETH,

ROUND AND ROUND

—and steadied himself by thinking about the cold metal of the gun, the weight of it in his fingers, a feeling of calm, of release.

“The gun you found,” he said. “You’re going to find my fingerprints on it.”

AVERY

Avery sat at the kitchen island eating chicken enchiladas that Rita had brought—right out of the dish. She couldn’t remember the last time an actual meal had been cooked in this house.

God bless Rita.

Each bite brought Avery closer to tears.